Looking at JWOC results and peer nations

How did the US runners do compared to runners from "peer nations" at the just completed JWOC?

I spent a few minutes this morning looking at results. Basically, I give the US a "win" each time a US runner beats a runner from a peer nation and a "loss" each time a runner from a peer nation beats a US runner. Lets say a US runner finishes 46th in a middle qualifying heat. A runner from Canada finishes 35th. That's a loss. A runner from Portugal finishes 10th. That's another loss. A runner from Ireland finishes 55th. That's a win. A runner from Japan finishes 54th. That's another win. You get the idea. I do that for each of the individual events, count up all of the wins and losses, and calculate a winning percentage.

At the 2009 JWOC, the US went 62-80-4 (wins-losses-ties) against the peer nations of Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and Portugal.

Ties happened in two situations. In one race, two runners had the same finish time. But, I also gave "ties" if the runners I was comparing both mispunched or didn't finish.

The US had a win percentage of 45.1 (I just ignored the ties).

I haven't calculated peer nation results for JWOCs before, but I've done it for WOCs and you can get an idea of how the JWOC results compare to WOC results.

WOC US winning percentages:

2005 24 percent2006 26 percent2007 51 percent2008 32 percent

You probably shouldn't make much of comparing WOC and JWOC win percentages, but it gives you a sense of the 2009 JWOC results, which I'd characterize as reasonably good.

In tracked the results by discipline: sprint, long, and middle qualifying. The US results are strikingly similar for all three disciplines. Here are wins-losses for each discipline: